What is Alpha Testing – A Complete Guide

What is Alpha Testing?

Alpha Testing is conducted in an organization to determine all possible bugs and defects before releasing the final product to the real users. It is done by the testers who are mostly internal employees of the organization.

It is fake or real functional testing at its own site. The Unit testing, integration testing is done before the alpha testing. It is used after all the testing is executed.

Based on requirement alpha testing can be a white box, or Black-box testing, a particular lab environment, and a simulation of the real environment needed for this testing.

What is the Alpha Testing Process?

This testing is performed as per the below process steps:

1. Requirement Review: Review the functional requirement and the design of the system specification

2. Test Development: Test development is depending on the output of the required review. In this development, phase Develop the test cases and test plan.

3. Test case Execution: Execute the test case and test plan during test case execution.

4. Logging Defects: Logging the identified and noticed bugs found in the application.

5. Bug Fixation: When all the bugs are determined and logged into the system, then there is a requirement to fix that logged bug.

6. Retesting: When all issues are fixed from the developer side then start retesting is done.

What are the phases of Alpha Testing?

It confirms that the software executes perfectly and does not affect the importance of the organization; the company executes final testing in the form of alpha testing. It is executed in two different phases.

You can see the detailed description of the two phases is as below: First Phase:

Internal developers of software engineers do this first phase of testing. In this 1st phase, the tester used a hardware debugger or hardware-aided debugger to detect the bug fast. At the time of alpha testing, a tester can find a lot of errors, bugs, crashes, missing features, and docs.

Second Phase:

In the second phase, It affects the quality assurance staff conducting the alpha testing by applying black box and white box techniques.

What are the features of Alpha Testing?

• It is one type of acceptance testing.
• It is occurring at the stage of the completion of the software product.
• It is in the labs where we provide an exact and suitable environment.
• It is in-house testing, which is performed by the internal testers within the company.
• There is not any public involvement.
• It helps to earn confidence in the user approval of the software product.
• We can achieve alpha testing with the help of the black box and white box techniques.
• It confirms the highest possible quality of the software before releasing it to market or customers for beta testing.
• During testing developers complete alpha testing at the developer’s site; it allows the developer to document the error with the ease to resolve found bugs fast.
• Generally, It is done after the other testing like unit testing, integration testing, system testing but before the beta testing.
• Mostly alpha testing is used for testing software products, applications, and projects.

What are the advantages of Alpha Testing?

Advantages are as below:

• This testing decreases the delivery time of the project.
• It delivers a whole test plan and test cases.
• Team members are early free for another project.
• All feedback is helpful to enhance software quality.
• It delivers a more useful observation of the software’s dependability and accountability.

What are the disadvantages of Alpha Testing?

The disadvantages are as below:

• It doesn’t apply in-depth testing of the software.
• The difference between the tester’s and customer’s tests the data for testing the software data from their view may result in the difference in the software functioning.
• The used lab environment for alpha testing still lab cannot refill all requirements of the real environment like the number of conditions, aspects, and possibilities.

Read Also:

1) Alpha Vs Beta Testing

2) What is Beta Testing?-A Brief Guide